Staying healthy as a vegan without having control over my diet

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Canastenard
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Staying healthy as a vegan without having control over my diet

Post by Canastenard »

Hello, I'm now a student and I am hosted far from my home from late Sunday to mid Friday. Outside of the weekend I have no control over my diet and am stuck with whatever there is in the public restauration service. I'll be honest, if I only ate what they serve without animal products I'd completely starve!

So in addition to eating vegan at the public restauration service (although it's unfortunately easy to be fooled by plant-based food seasoned with dairy products like cream or butter: I added salsify to my plate then the person right after asked what it was seasoned with and the cook said it was with cream :| ) I get some food from my home to eat in my room after the meal to not starve, here's my plan:
- breakfast: 10 grams of whole hemp seeds + a homemade vegan non-sweet crepe made with 50% white wheat flour, 45% soy flour and 5% pure gluten on which is spread homemade cashew puree;
- lunch: 10 grams of whole hemp seeds + 2 grams of nutritional yeast + B12/D3/DHA supplement (supplements I take every day anyway);
- dinner: 10 grams of whole hemp seeds + 2 grams of nutritional yeast + 1 Brazil nut + a few grams of dried wakame.

I take the crepe because breakfast is extremely bar-bone here, I take one with 20 grams of protein at home but here I only have a few fruits, white bread to spread jam on, and maybe a soy yoghurt if I'm lucky. I choose to not sweeten the crepe in order to avoid blood sugar spikes, maybe rather than replacing it with nothing I could put an artificial sweetener to make it more palatable. I put white wheat flour because I believe it's reliable for taste but I'm worried it might increase the glycemic load and it is fairly nutrient poor, could it be possible to replace it with a less processed wheat flour for better nutrition? I tried however to eat one this morning (exceptionaly I quit my home during the morning yesterday to start class during the afternoon) and it tasted absolutely disgusting... so I threw them away. I should have put them in an insulated bag alongside ice packs.

Maybe I could add peanuts to that, they're a tasty and convenient way to get lysine, but I'm worried about the omega-6 which might make the balance poor. It might be a good idea to compensate by adding chia seeds but I wasn't a fan of them when I tried them, and they should be able to nourish me preferably without having to ground them (which would make them more convenient than flax).

I don't like how this public restauration service is ill-adapted for vegans... I mean they assume by default if you don't eat meat then you eat fish instead. At home I eat a lot of legumes as the main protein and energy source of my meals, if not legumes then quinoa or buckwheat, more rarely whole wheat pasta, all of that alongside vegetables and omega-3 rich fats. Now I more often have to rely on high starch low nutrient food like white wheat pasta and white rice. There are soy yoghurts which provide supplemental calcium but I'm worried it might make my stomach more alkaline and lower the absorption of iron and zinc which is already often not found in big quantities in high starch processed food, although I also take an orange for dessert which I hope can counteract the alkaline effect of the soy yoghurt with its acidity. Also the nutrient I'm the most concerned about is vitamin A which I get from orange vegetables and to a lesser extent cruciferous and leafy vegetables, but there's less of them in the restauration service and I don't have a clear idea of an healthy and convenient way to get it from my own additional food. Maybe add sweet potato to the cashew puree? Wakame gives some but eating more than a few grams seems too dangerous because of the iodine content that would be too high.

Finally I'm now considering going ostrovegan given that I'm not ethically opposed to sessile bivalve consumption (fun fact, the video that made me stop sitting on the fence about the ethics of eating them was a video from a channel about medicine that showcased a variety of non-voluntary reflexes of the human body) and mussels would be an excellent source of nutrients most people expect to get from animal products (protein, vitamin A, zinc) so when they're occasionally served it would help me not getting undernourished. However I'm going to encounter the centre's nurse the day after (for a small personal meeting everyone has to do anyway) and I think she might not understand the reason of abstaining from animal products except for sessile bivalves. I mean, vegan is known to the mainstream but ostrovegan... I also don't know whether it will make me seen as more normal or even weirder my classmates. I haven't done my "coming out" yet and they were joking about the "vegan", "organic", "100% recyclable", "for each one bought one wind mill installed" stuff, but it will be important because I'm invinted to the restaurant this Thursday so I have to announce it before that. I also fear of not being understood that while sessile bivalves are ok fish aren't... I mean, considering people tend to deny a relevant moral difference between animals and plants, then good luck making them understand the ethical difference between sessile bivalves and fish.
Appeal to nature: the strange belief that what is perceived as "natural" is necessarily safer, more effective or morally superior compared to what isn't.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Staying healthy as a vegan without having control over my diet

Post by brimstoneSalad »

I suggest you talk to the administration and restaurant staff about this.
They may be willing to prepare you something.

If they will not serve adequate food for you, you can usually get out of paying for it and buy your own to prepare in your dormitory etc.
You shouldn't have to pay twice for food, and I'm sure they have this issue with allergens and religious issues.

Might be better to stick with vegan to avoid confusing them if you think that could be an issue.

If you stay with them, you can get around most obstacles with modest supplementation. Consider a multi and DHA. For protein you might just want to make a powder-based shake that you can chug and not worry about the taste, then you can pretty much just eat rice, fruit, and veggies at your school canteen.

I wouldn't worry about the calcium in the yogurt, it's probably not enough to cause a problem, and yes the orange should help.
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Canastenard
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Re: Staying healthy as a vegan without having control over my diet

Post by Canastenard »

Thanks for your advices. This gives me some elements of answers.

When you mention "talk to the administration and restaurant staff" I think I will do that with the nurse I'm encountering tomorrow. I think I might ask her about serving lowly refined plant food more often, especially lentils and beans, explaining how they're important as a source of protein and minerals for me, as well as asking for more vegetables including orange ones for good vitamin A levels. I might also ask if the salt is iodized; for iodine I rely on the wakame I take with me, but relying on iodized salt could be better. Making sure there is a soy yoghurt at every meal might also be a good idea. I must also make sure to mention I supplement with vitamin B12 as vegan diets are otherwise unviable.

And now about how to make my "coming out" after my classmates have made fun of "vegan" this is what I'm worried about, considering I have trouble socializing and for the first time since like an eternity I feel like I'm actually being integrated to an IRL social group. Maybe make sure to make them understand I'm not a pro-pseudoscience hippie by saying that I don't care about eating organic or something like that? For the mussel thing, maybe not eat them myself but at least admit I have in theory no ethical problem about eating them, and rather explaining the fact I don't eat them by pure taste reasons (like how I can't stand endives). I don't know if it's the most honest thing because before going vegan there was a time when I indeed found them gross but I got around it and eventually found them tasty... but at the same time it's been more than one year and half that I haven't eaten animal flesh so yeah they might gross me out. Anyway it's important for me to make my "coming-out" since I'm invinted to the restaurant for the dinner tomorrow, I might decline considering the city where I am seems terrible at catering to vegans with its restaurants.
Appeal to nature: the strange belief that what is perceived as "natural" is necessarily safer, more effective or morally superior compared to what isn't.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Staying healthy as a vegan without having control over my diet

Post by brimstoneSalad »

You can call ahead to the restaurant to find out.

I don't think you should worry too much about coming out; they probably make fun of all kinds of things, and will be a bit embarrassed if they remember doing so around you.

You can complain about the hippie organic vegans to them to relate to them more after.
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Canastenard
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Re: Staying healthy as a vegan without having control over my diet

Post by Canastenard »

I talked about my dietary choices to the centre's nurse and cook, now they're aware of them. I asked the cook if he could serve legumes and vegetables more often, he expectedly said that he couldn't cater to me specifically by cooking a small portion just for me but told me he would take my preferences into account when serving food. He also told me that there would always be soy yoghurts available. I also didn't mention anything about sessile bivalves since it would likely have caused confusion, so I kept the "no animal products" to keep it simple.

I think I'm still gonna take hemp seeds and Brazil nuts with me, the former is a great nutrient-dense food while the later would secure my selenium intake, and it would still be inexpensive. I'm not sure about crepes, they'd be more expensive, but at the same time they would also allow me to not worry about spoiling the soy milk I buy: at home for breakfast I take a porridge with soy milk and oatmeals, and the amount of soy milk I put is generally 200 ml. However, that would leave 600 ml in the 1 liter carton, and I'm worried it might go bad while I'm not at home, so making crepes with the rest might be a way to not waste it. I would then take five crepes and offer the rest to my father (I live at his home), but it would really leave him a lot of them, maybe I could increase the amount of soy milk in my morning porridge to 250 or 300 ml (which would increase the size of my breakfast: it might be a good idea to take big meals to make up for the underwhelming diet I take in public restauration). I've estimated the cost of making 10 crepes plus cashew puree from 100 grams of cashew and it might represent a total cost of about 6 and half euros.

I think however that not making crepes might be a better idea. And with a 250 ml porridge I could abstain from making crepes at all if one week in the fridge is not too much before the remaining half of the soy milk carton goes bad; I could freeze it to be safe but the research I've done suggests me that freezing soy milk changes its texture, but maybe it's not a big deal if I only use it to make porridge. I should also check if the grocery store where I buy my soy milk also sells it in smaller formats that would be more practical for me. Without making crepes I could replace them with peanuts and chia seeds which would probably be cheaper, although I still need a good source of vitamin A; dried mango or papaya might be good for that but I fear they might be expensive.

Apparently I've misunderstood something and we didn't go to the restaurant (I couldn't have called it anyway since I didn't know which restaurant it was specifically), so I didn't bother coming out. Instead we had a conversation about the recent #FakeMed movement (which was about French MDs protesting about alt-med) and made fun of homeopathy, so I think I gave them (not all of them, we were only a third of the entire group including me) a good first impression which I think can help breaking the anti-science hippie cliché of veganism.
Appeal to nature: the strange belief that what is perceived as "natural" is necessarily safer, more effective or morally superior compared to what isn't.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Staying healthy as a vegan without having control over my diet

Post by brimstoneSalad »

That's good to hear about your canteen.

If you aren't getting much wheat a Brazil nut is probably a good idea, or a multivitamin.
You typically need to keep hemp seeds refrigerated. Maybe try Walnuts, they'll last longer. Or get a DHA supplement.

I don't think soymilk would go bad in the refrigerator in a week. I wouldn't worry about making crepes.
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Canastenard
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Re: Staying healthy as a vegan without having control over my diet

Post by Canastenard »

brimstoneSalad wrote: Thu Apr 26, 2018 5:46 pm You typically need to keep hemp seeds refrigerated.
I eat unhulled hemp seeds, not hulled ones. I suppose keeping the hull would make hemp seeds easier to store without going bad, or would it still be better to keep them refrigerated?
Appeal to nature: the strange belief that what is perceived as "natural" is necessarily safer, more effective or morally superior compared to what isn't.
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Re: Staying healthy as a vegan without having control over my diet

Post by brimstoneSalad »

In the hull they would stay fresh longer. I never thought of hemp seeds in the hull as edible, though.
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Re: Staying healthy as a vegan without having control over my diet

Post by Canastenard »

These last two days I feel like the quality of my meals have improved. I think they retained the lesson from Friday when they had nothing for me as main meal material, so they rushed me a plate of potatoes. To compare yesterday I had lentils with carrots which was really great.

Also it was about time — I specifically got asked about by abstinence from eating meat by two classmates. They mentioned protein so I responded that there also are other excellent sources of plant protein like lentils then they said "you don't have plant protein sources every meal", so what I responded was that protein is everywhere just in different concentrations among different foods. When they asked me why I deliberately abstain from meat I responded that I thought meal was not a good time to discuss that, I mean I don't really want to tell other people they're literally eating the body parts of brutally slaughtered animal.

Also the start of my training course is very soft, for the time being it's mostly about discovering and learning the very basics, we'll learn things like actual programming (this is a computer science training course) only later. One of the first works we have to do is to make a good PowerPoint presentation, we publicly declared what the theme of our PowerPoint would be, as it could be anything we wanted, and of all the themes possibles I chose biotechnology.
This could be a way for me to communicate about things that happen in the vegan biotech movement, like leather from yeasts genetically engineered to produce collagen, and of course ex vivo meat (which I'm not going to call "clean meat" to avoid the sentiment of explicit moral superiority); I don't think I'm going to talk about Geltor's gelatin (except maybe for the novelty appeal of gummies made from the gelatin of extinct animals) considering in the current world gelatin is a cheap slaughterhouse byproduct, nor about dairy or egg proteins from Perfect Day or Clara Foods respectively since I expect that the problems with animal products that aren't animal body parts don't seem so obvious to most non-vegans. I also plan to use environmental and sanitary arguments rather than animal ethics ones to, again, limit the risk of being perceived as an holier-than-thou propagandist.
Of course I'm not only going to talk about vegan biotech alternatives to products traditionally obtained from animals (and I'm going to avoid the word "vegan" anyway), I'm also going to talk about vaccines, the fantastic story of human genome sequencing, synthetic hormones (like insulin; another example where GM technology veganized it, but I'm instead going to appeal to increased reliability of the insulin supply rather than animal ethics), and the CRISPR/Cas-9 discovery. I'll try to not talk too much about GM crops, at least I'm not going to talk about Bt let alone glyphosate tolerant crops because I live in the very GMO-phobic France and I'm expecting more social backlash from mentioning the benefits of these GMOs than being vegan :lol: because I don't want to make people believe my parents work for Monsanto or something. But I think it might be honest to talk about one or two gene edited crops with other traits that are a little more exotic to minimize the risk of backlash as a response to mentioning the potential of GM crops, and preferably talk about crops obtained with the aforementioned Cas9 technology.
And since I'm in a computer training course, I feel obligated to mention DNA-based digital data storage
(https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4079). If this technology manages to be practical to replace traditional silicon-based hard drives it would be a huge game changer in sustainable technology considering how much space and energy it would save. Considering how potentially relevant the subject is to my training course I think it's something perfect to talk about, and I would even go as far as considering paying to read the article beyond the abstract to have a more detailed understanding on it than what is told in press releases about the subject and thus a more accurate presentation of it. I also wonder if there's anything else in the field of bioinformatics that would be mentioned, in the same sense as DNA data storage using biological agents and processes as integral parts of computing technologies.
Appeal to nature: the strange belief that what is perceived as "natural" is necessarily safer, more effective or morally superior compared to what isn't.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Staying healthy as a vegan without having control over my diet

Post by brimstoneSalad »

That's great news!
Canastenard wrote: Tue May 01, 2018 7:28 pm This could be a way for me to communicate about things that happen in the vegan biotech movement, like leather from yeasts genetically engineered to produce collagen, and of course ex vivo meat (which I'm not going to call "clean meat" to avoid the sentiment of explicit moral superiority); I don't think I'm going to talk about Geltor's gelatin (except maybe for the novelty appeal of gummies made from the gelatin of extinct animals) considering in the current world gelatin is a cheap slaughterhouse byproduct, nor about dairy or egg proteins from Perfect Day or Clara Foods respectively since I expect that the problems with animal products that aren't animal body parts don't seem so obvious to most non-vegans. I also plan to use environmental and sanitary arguments rather than animal ethics ones to, again, limit the risk of being perceived as an holier-than-thou propagandist.
That all sounds great.

I'd stop short of the DNA storage, I think you'll be stretching yourself too far. And it's pretty much never worth paying for access to a paper.
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